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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24961516">red witch</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera'>BlackSclera</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Katekyou Hitman Reborn!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>BAMF Sawada Nana, Iemitsu is a goddamn fool, Magic, Nana is a philosopher stone, Tsuna is a little special</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 01:47:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,745</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24961516</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p><br/>    <em>“All you have to do is accept me,” the Witch says, voice layered with a hundred souls that speak in a hundred languages, some long since withered into the dunes and a few still spoken in the lands far beyond the forest where they lived. “Accept me, and I shall set your adversaries alight with a fire that can never be extinguished by the greatest of waves and the purest of waters. I shall burn kingdoms and return all those that have been born of the earth and lay them to rest in ashes where they rightfully belong.”</em><br/></p>
</blockquote>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>118</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>red witch</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i dont remember writing this at all.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>It all starts with a red jewel.</p><p> </p><p>They say it grants immortality and the power to conquer lands and raze empires to the ground. They say it can grant any of your wishes, from the most beautiful women’s hands in marriage to towers of gold that stood higher than any man.</p><p> </p><p>Wars were waged to get a glimpse of it. Even bloodier were the battles between those who have seen and had a taste of its power.</p><p> </p><p>And so it goes for the better half of a century, before the jewel abruptly disappears under their noses. Dead men tell no tales so nobody knows where the jewel has fallen- other than the rumors that tentatively slip through the cracks.</p><p> </p><p>A witch, they whisper, hushed and so utterly terrified for their lives. A witch with long hair that bloomed like fire and blazed like the sun had taken the jewel for herself and sewed it to her skin. She had eyes that shone red, fingers glowing with the power of the artifact, and some legends say she <em>is</em> the jewel, just severely misunderstood by the ignorant and the fearful. In most, though, they call her demon incarnate, her fire symbolizing the flames of hell and the antichrist.</p><p> </p><p>With the mystery of its disappearance bearing fruitless for the following decades, the search for the jewel gradually came to a faltering halt. That isn’t to say, however, that they have completely forgotten about it. Some built their religion around its myth, a certain few worshipping it in hopes of having their wish granted as most claimed it had the power to. Time and time again, organizations and cults of ancient origin came forth with the desire to find and stake their claim on the jewel that had the power to rule and destroy the world as they know it.</p><p> </p><p>Time and time again, however, they would fail and turn into ashes by the hands of the Red Witch.</p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>Nana grows up hearing stories about the red witch who outsmarted empires and ended wars before they could even begin by stealing a jewel. About the witch’s descendants and the curse that would make them incapable of bearing a son, about the jewel that was everything like what they said in the myths buried inches deep into the front of her skull, about red magic and blazing fires that purified evil, about their duty to protect both the jewel and the witch’s legacy.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p><em> Her mother brushes </em> <em> her bangs away from her eyes and touches the jewel that protrudes through the skin of her forehead. It glows upon contact, the same red shimmer peeking through her mother’s hair in answer, and suddenly, she isn’t her mother anymore but someone older, wiser, and more powerful than anything else that has set its foot on earth. </em></p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>“All you have to do is accept me,” the Witch says, voice layered with a hundred souls that speak in a hundred languages, some long since withered into the dunes and a few still spoken in the lands far beyond the forest where they lived. “Accept me, and I shall set your adversaries alight with a fire that can never be extinguished by the greatest of waves and the purest of waters. I shall burn kingdoms and return all those that have been born of the earth and lay them to rest in ashes where they rightfully belong.”</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Nana looks at her, at the blooming cracks on her mother’s skin now drawn thin from the exhaustion of her prolonged lifespan, and she knows it is time.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>“I accept you,” Nana says, eyebrows furrowed in determination and fists clenched at her sides. The jewel glows near blindingly bright between her eyes.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>The Red Witch takes Nana’s face into her hands and smiles, flames – a deep, deep red that reminded her of the blood that poured from the slit throat of their hunts – erupting from her fingertips. </em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Nana burns for days in her hands. She burns until the jewel on her mother’s forehead dulls into an obsolete rock, the fire that lights her eyes reduced into a pitiful, flickering thing. She burns until the voices quiet and all that is left is her mother’s own. And she watches her mother’s body crumble, watches as she is reduced into nothing but ashes carried by the cold, biting wind of the mountains.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Nana stops aging when she turns eighteen and the jewel on her forehead grows bright with the souls that it has taken. Within her head, she hears her mother’s voice, one among many.</p><p> </p><p>She leaves the mountain and never comes back.</p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>Nana wanders.</p><p> </p><p>She wanders through city after city, spends a few months in several villages, and heals those who need healing and fixes what needs fixing until rumors spark anew about the Red Witch of the myths. There is a restless silence from those who have not forgotten, a brewing hurricane waiting to unleash all that it is on her after long, long years of waiting.</p><p> </p><p><em>Let them come,</em> the Red Witch whispers, a red smile fueled with the bloodthirst and cunning of a millennium carved into a face that looked like her mother’s, her grandmother’s, her grand-grandmother’s and every single descendant of Hers. They were special, sharing both blood and face and fire and fate, but never the same soul.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>I will burn them all alive.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>And Nana who was more a Witch than her mother ever was, doesn’t hide in a mountain and waste her not inconsiderate lifespan hiding. She makes her presence known, beckons the greedy and the envious and the wrathful with the rumors of Her return, and burns every single one of them into ashes.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>(Unsurprisingly, humankind hasn’t changed.</p><p> </p><p>They have a different name – <em>“heaven” </em>- compared to the ouroboro of a forgotten time and the phoenix that gave chase from a recent century, but they make the same mistakes, weapons raised and sharp blades doused with lethal poisons held by men with a wild, hungry look in their eyes, staking claims on something that is already someone else’s.</p><p> </p><p><em>How foolish, </em>she thinks. Her long hair, colored in the reds and oranges of her captors’ burning compound, whips around her like a raging fire.</p><p> </p><p>Those weapons could hurt humans. If given to the talented, the experienced and the desperate, it could potentially even kill.</p><p> </p><p>But Nana- Nana is no human. She heals even if her body has more holes than there is flesh, amputated limbs stitching themselves back into place, and the blood that pours out of her return into her bloodstream. In one memorable occasion, all that was left of her had been her head, and even then, that hadn’t been enough to stop her from coming back to life.</p><p> </p><p>Just as it had been in the distant past, no one survives long enough to tell.)</p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>Many, many years later, she meets Sawada Iemitsu in a small town that sang back to the magic that hummed under her skin.</p><p> </p><p>Nana is no stranger to the scent of gunpowder and sin. She is attuned to it like a shark picking up on a scant drop of blood in ocean waters; she knows what Iemitsu is before he even makes his terrible, terrible excuses and pathetic lies. He is far from the worst evil she has met but there is something inside him, something intangible and dark and <em>familiar</em> crawling in his bloodstream and even deeper that she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like for her to pry his chest apart with her bare hands and see it with her own eyes. Perhaps that is why Nana allows him to take her hand into his own, allows him the vow of a marriage and the slide of a ring – <em>a shackle </em>– on her finger.</p><p> </p><p>Iemitsu smiles at her like she’s his whole world and Nana plays her role well just as her mother had with her father who she never met, echoes the expression of adoration in his eyes. It isn’t quite love – it never would be, not with what Nana is - but she’s willing to stay, happy to make pretend despite the blood that coats his hands.</p><p> </p><p>It has been so long since she has left for the mountains and never looked back. Maybe it was about time she settled down.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>The men in black with the kanji for ‘heaven’ inked into the skin of their necks stop appearing after their marriage. She feels more than sees the presences lurking near her home, extinguishing the moths that dare come too close to the flame, and she struggles to curb the fire that itches to incinerate every single one of them- be it her silent protectors or her assailants. </em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>They were no saints, every single one of them, and she thinks they will make a worthy sacrifice to the jewel the same way Iemitsu would with his confusing but wonderful soul.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>Still, she reasons, it wouldn’t do good to blow her cover, not this close to the surface as Sawada Nana. She is too human to be seen playing with fire. Too real of a person to be easily forgotten now that she has a home and a husband.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>(It could wait. With her lifespan, she would probably outlive Iemitsu twice over and still have a couple of decades to spare. When the time comes, she can come take his soul and see the thing he is hiding underneath his skin.)</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>They are cursed.</p><p> </p><p>She knows this- every descendant knows it like the color of their blood. They are born with one face and one fate. They stop aging at eighteen and live long, long lives.</p><p> </p><p>It is also impossible for them to bear a son.</p><p> </p><p>And yet, Nana thinks, horror and fascination and bitter anger of the few hundred souls that lived in her ripping into the soft flesh under the bones of her chest. <em>And yet.</em></p><p>
  
</p><p>She looks at the baby boy she is cradling in her arms.</p><p> </p><p><em>Tsunayoshi is a miracle</em>, the souls think.</p><p> </p><p>And as Nana pushes his hair away from his face to look at the boy squinting through his still unseeing eyes, they realize that he is also a <strong>monster</strong>.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>The jewel stands bright on his skin, and his eyes glowed an inhuman gold.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>(Iemitsu, Nana remembers, carried something within him. Familiar, and with her son in her arms, she realizes what it is.</em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>
  <em>It’s the feeling of too many souls cramped in one human body.)</em>
</p><p> </p>
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